Beam (BEAM)
Basics * Crypto that came out of the Mimblewimble community. Is simmilar to Grin, which is launched around the same time. * From this CoinDesk article (21-12-2018): "An atmosphere of friendly competition between the two has taken shape since Beam’s announcement – though it’s occasionally tipped into outright resentment from each side. Nowadays, though, Beam’s code is public, and the two projects are feeding back on each other as well. For example, Beam even partially funded Grin’s security audit. Whereas Grin followed a highly principled, cypherpunk ideology – including no token premine or ICO, as well as volunteer-based development – Beam sought VC funding and hired a team of developers to work on the software full-time, allowing it to speed ahead of Grin in its implementation." Tech * From this article by Bitcoinmagazine (1-8-2018): "Beam is being implemented in coding language C++ (like Bitcoin Core). More comparable to Zcash, Beam will be launched and maintained by a for-profit company with the same name (currently headed by Israeli entrepreneur Alexander Zaidelson), though this maintaining role should later transition to a non-profit foundation. Beam will also have a founders’ reward: the Beam company and foundation will receive 20 percent of all newly mined coins for the first five years. It’s not yet announced what Beam’s emission schedule will look like, but (unlike Grin and like Bitcoin) it will be capped. Beam is also being tested right now and is scheduled to launch in December 2018." * From this CoinDesk article (3-1-2019): "As explained on Beam’s official GitHub, users will be able to decide for themselves “which information will be available and to which parties, having complete control over his personal data in accordance to his will and applicable laws.” In short, this means that Beam has the optional feature of transparency, which could be beneficial to businesses that want to use the coin but need to have some insight into who they’re transacting with. In addition, Beam also builds upon an additional piece of technology known as Dandelion that was released a year after the infamous mimblewimble white paper. Dandelion focuses on obscuring network traffic activity by randomizing the pathways through which transactions get dispersed on a decentralized network." ASIC Resistance * Beam has launched with a slightly modified version of Equihash that only general purpose hardware (GPUs) should be able to mine. However, it only intends to keep the ASICs at bay for a 12 month period, giving the GPU miners a “head start,” one of the ambassadors said. * Had a hard fork in July 2019. At block height 321,321 the mining algorithm was changed from Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II. "The rationale is to signal to ASIC developers that there is no point to start developing ASICs until the second hard fork is out. We timed the first fork roughly 6 months from launch, and the second one is expected at the beginning of 2020. The 6-month timeframe is chosen because that’s how long it usually takes to develop a new ASIC chip." Roadmap * Beam cited its plans to integrate with BOLT, the privacy-centric lightning implementation (In a later team update it was called: Lightning Network POC (Laser Beam) and was demonstrated in 9-2019), as well as adding atomic swaps and other features. Lelantus Implementation * From this blog post (26-9-2019): "The technology caught our attention in July 2019, and Vlad Gelfer, our core dev, started studying it and finding ways to adapt it to Mimblewimble. The result of this work is a special Mimblewimble-adapted flavor of Lelantus that we called simply Lelantus-MW. For more details on the protocol and how it is different from the original Lelantus, read our Wiki article here. The PoC implementation of Lelantus-MW can be found here, it is still work-in-progress. We would like to thank Aram, Reuben and the Zcoin team for the friendly cooperation, and we hope to continue working together to make Lelantus better for everyone. We will go on working on Lelantus-MW and plan to fully implement it on Testnet before the end of 2019 and release Lelantus-MW on mainnet in early 2020" Later saying: "As we started working on Lelantus, it became clear that it greatly improved privacy." Which hits to some possible short comings in the Mimblewimble protocol. Upcoming releases * From this roadmap blog post (26-9-2019) "The Double Doppler release will include the following major features: * A decentralized marketplace for Atomic Swaps in the Beam wallet * Lelantus-MW on Testnet * Confidential Assets POC/Testnet * Multisig * Hardware Wallets — Finalizing Trezor working on Ledger support * Opt-in Audit — initial features The next version, codenamed Eager Electron, will be released in the first quarter of 2020 and will contain the following items: * Second Hard Fork (PoW update) * Lelantus-MW on Mainnet * Confidential Assets on Mainnet * Tor/i2P integration Some of the functionality that we originally planned for 2019 but was given lower priority compared to other tasks: * GhostDAG research and POC — delayed to 2020 * Porting to Rust — we will seek the community help for this. Beam Foundation will issue grants to perform this task. * Enhanced Wallet Security — delayed till we start working on Beam Business Wallet * Lightning — while Lightning is a fascinating technology, we feel that Beam network is fast and private enough at the moment, so the work on full Lighting implementation is also delayed * BLS Signatures — currently delayed, we will review this in the beginning of 2020 Our 2019 goal is to build a solid Layer 1 network for Beam. In 2020, we will spend more time on expanding Layer 2 and making Beam more of a platform. Confidential Assets being the first step in this direction, the natural next steps is to offer full Smart Contract capabilities to our network. Smart Contracts will allow for a multitude of applications, including stable coins, P2P lending, non-custodial exchanges, and other DeFi applications. Mimblewimble does not support smart contracts per se, so the right way to add them to Beam is through a sidechain. We will be researching the existing projects to choose the right technology for the sidechain (can be Libra, Ton or something else). Our high-level design goals are to create a sidechain with Turing-complete smart contracts, multiple assets with the ability for 1-to-1 pegging to assets on Beam mainnet, fast execution and strong privacy." Team, investors, etc. Team * Headed by Israeli entrepreneur Alexander Zaidelson (CEO) * Alex Romanov; CTO * Amir Aaronson; COO * Wilke Trei (aka Lolliedieb); PoW Advisor who developed Beam Hash I and Beam Hash II * Vlad Gelfer, core dev * Guy Corem; dev * Has a large amount of 'Ambassadors' and advisers. Investors * Has investments of a bunch of companies, some of which are: Youbi Capital, Alternity and Ceyuan Ventures Category:Coins/Tokens